Legally Blonde (2001)

Years before the feel-good musical! Elle Woods (Reese Witherspoon) is the beyond blonde Californian sorority queen who just wants to settle down with her boyfriend Warner Huntington III (Matthew Davis) after graduation from college and on the night she thinks he’s going to propose he dumps her  – for a brunette swot Vivian Kensington (Selma Blair) who’s going to Harvard Law with him.  Elle decides to follow him and crams for the Law School Admission Test – and winds up at Harvard too, pretty in pink with her beloved chihuahua in tow. She’s laughed out of class and takes refuge at a hair salon owned by Paulette (Jennifer Coolidge) and gets real, hits the books and winds up being romanced by her tutor Luke Wilson and getting on the team to defend a wealthy widow who’s accused of murdering her much older husband. Very funny outing with the redoubtable Witherspoon giving a barnstorming performance in a smart satire with a big princess heart at its centre.  The concluding courtroom scene is a doozy. With a slew of nice supporting cast including Ali Larter, Oz Perkins, Victor Garber and Raquel Welch, this is nicely shot by Anthony B. Richmond, and directed by Robert Luketic from a screenplay by Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith, adapting Amanda Brown’s novel (the first in a series).

Cynara (1932)

Fascinating pre-Code melodrama with Ronald Colman as the staid London barrister whose rock solid marriage to the disarming Kay Francis when she takes off for Venice with her flighty younger sister is challenged when Mephistopholean colleague Henry Stephenson manoeuvres him into a romance with attractive shopgirl Phyllis Barry. Cunningly adapted by Frances Marion and Lynn Starling from the novel by Robert Gore-Brown, this is structured as a flashback and there are some startling slices of dialogue to cut through the class froth. This is an opportunity to experience the fragrant charms of cult fave Francis while Colman is typically good. Directed by King Vidor.

We’re Not Married (1952)

A mild anthology romcom from screenwriter Nunnally Johnson whose main attraction these days is Marilyn Monroe:  she’s one half of a set of couples whose marriages are deemed null and void because Justice of the Peace Victor Moore conducted the ceremonies in the week prior to his appointment being formalised. The segments look at the effect the news has: Ginger Rogers and Fred Allen are the unhappy couple playing happily married for a huge radio audience. Marilyn is Mrs Mississippi and hubby David Wayne is fed up holding the baby so he’s only too glad to stop her disappearing to beauty pageants. Paul Douglas and Eve Arden barely speak to each other. Louis Calhern is too glad to dump gold-digger Zsa Zsa Gabor. And soldier Eddie Bracken (in a play on a role he did for Preston Sturges …) needs to remarry his pregnant bride before he ships out. If you want to see who among them remarries, you had better watch. But the payoff to really enjoy is Marilyn’s.